One of the biggest stories unfolding right now, concerning the net, is the various websites that comprise the online media empire of possibly the most odious man on Earth – Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Lies News Corps – being walled off amid cries of “if we don’t start charging for online content, news media will die”.

Now, as much as I despise the guy, he does have a point that advertising alone just won’t cut it. It’s an uncomfortable point I’ve tried to address more than a few times and, if we want all this cool stuff to hang around for any length of time, there needs to be a more direct route for making money off of editorial content/media on the net than relying on the mcguffin we know as advertising.

With video and audio media, I certainly see the cable subscription and pay-per-view systems being introduced for the likes of Hulu, with user generated content sites remaining ad driven or cheaper ways of proving show concepts/pilots and of harvesting talent, with the media firms paying some form of agent’s fee to the open video sites for their use. It’ll end up as “same as it ever was” for this industry, hell the video-on-demand service of Channel Five here in the UK is already going down this route. It’s just the way for indie content producers to get into the “big time” could be made easier – and the cost of making that content for the big media firms could have a little downward pressure on it for a change.

However, print media is a trickier thing entirely.

The ease of crafting/delivery compared to audio/video media means, for them to stand a chance of survival; they’ll have to become “bundled services” you get for free with other media subscriptions. Kinda like the way you get free wifi for a year when you sign up to a contract with your iphone on O2.

Though, I’d always leave it open for buying a “single day pass” to the site for content published that day and older info should drop into a “free access” status with ads slapped on them, that way you can still keep residual linked traffic as well as making a little money off of those who still want yesterdays news for as cheap as possible.

Effectively turning a newspapers site into a hybrid model – a walled garden for breaking news, with diminishing costs after that when you drop into the archives.

I figure they’d make more money that way than simply walling it all off until you pony up for the keys. But then, the net would prolly be a nicer place without general access to anything spouted by Mr Murdoch’s insipid mouthpieces.